World population hits 7 billion on Oct. 31, or thereabouts

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04 Nov 2011, 7:39 pm

War does not work. WWII killed 50,000,000, but the world population never dipped. It only slowed the rate of increase, and was expensive, and blew up some nice stuff.

Korea, 10,000 rounds of everything, bombs, navel guns, down to pistols, for every wound, then only a third fatal.

Swords and spears are at least reusable.

the New Model is Warlordism. Take over an area, kill a lot, enslave the rest. It drives the breeders and surplus population onto your neighbors land, and weakens them.

African countries are being partitioned. Somalia belongs to Warlords. It has not been one country in a while.

This recent age of Kingdoms, Governments, was shortlived. They claimed more than they could hold, as the Colonial Era showed.

Russia could not hold the USSR together.

The Eurozone is coming apart.

They gave part of Serbia to Albanians.

What is the right size for a country?

France with Algeria, Viet Nam, West Africa, fell apart. Each of the parts is better off.

Africa is breaking down on Tribal lines, Sub Tribes, Language Groups. Just like it always was.

The British Empire.

No one group ever controlled Afganistan. The Tribal Areas of Pakistan were never under Government control.

It is the nature of all people to want to control themselves, and a few who want to conquer the world.

All Empires fall.



Esteban
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05 Nov 2011, 2:44 am

Gedrene wrote:
Esteban wrote:
Mexico has a much lower birth rate than Somalia and that has been the case for a long time, and has thus been able to avoid famine for decades, though not severe malnutrition in some places. Irrigating the desert costs money that Somalia doesn't have, and would be unnecessary if they had fewer mouths to feed. Even if they did have a green revolution, at the rate the population is growing (and the birth rate is so high that despite the high death rate and emigration it's one of the fastest-growing populations in the world), it'd just be a matter of time before it outgrows the country's capacity to feed it.

And I again say that this is a false idea because you are trying to equate capacity to produce according to existing resources with absolute ability to produce resources...
The problem is wealth and technology. Technology I am sure would be able to massively increase the amount of food available on the planet according to the natural resources that exist within it. In Somalia's case the scarcity of food producing technology is also a large factor.


Yes, I'm sure Somalia could produce a lot more food with modern industrialized agriculture - which requires fuel, machinery, lots of water, fertilizers, etc. All of which has a cost, both in terms of physical resources (the fossil fuels, labor, raw materials needed to produce them, the environmental degradation arising from their use) and in terms of money (in the developed world, agriculture is very heavily subsidized). Does the world really have the resources (fossil fuels, capacity to cope with pollution, etc) to have a Green Revolution in every country?

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Mexico's and Somalia's relative birth rate have got nothing to do with Somalia's inability to produce enough food.


On the contrary, it has everything to do with it. If you have, say, the capacity to produce food for ten million, and you have a population of 15 million, you don't have the capacity to produce enough food. If you can produce food for 10 million, but have 8 million people then, with exactly the same capacity, you do have the capacity to produce enough food. 'Enough' depends not only on the actual amount produced, but also on how many mouths to feed you have. Say you have a population of 15 million and with a technological revolution, you can produce food for 30 million. Sounds good, but if your population doubles every 20 years, then you're only kicking the can down the road. The only solution is to bring some sanity to the birth rate, unless you consider genocide a solution.



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05 Nov 2011, 4:56 am

Esteban wrote:
On the contrary, it has everything to do with it. If you have, say, the capacity to produce food for ten million, and you have a population of 15 million, you don't have the capacity to produce enough food. If you can produce food for 10 million, but have 8 million people then, with exactly the same capacity, you do have the capacity to produce enough food. 'Enough' depends not only on the actual amount produced, but also on how many mouths to feed you have. Say you have a population of 15 million and with a technological revolution, you can produce food for 30 million. Sounds good, but if your population doubles every 20 years, then you're only kicking the can down the road. The only solution is to bring some sanity to the birth rate, unless you consider genocide a solution.


The amount of food a country does produce is sometimes a function of demand. If the country could feed 100 million with the appropriate land use and technology but the population is 50 million it would be uneconomical to boost food production to feed 100 million unless one could export the surplus profitably to recover the investment.

Do not confuse current production levels with maximum potential production levels.

ruveyn



Esteban
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12 Nov 2011, 1:06 pm

But that's neither here nor there. No country can continue to feed, indefinitely, an exploding population like Somalia's, with or without Green Revolutions (which are themselves expensive - usually even access to huge markets aren't enough to bankroll them, and they require massive government subsidies). Therefore, either there will be a famine, or the birth rate will fall, or other factors will keep the population in check (genocide, war, epidemics). The Somali famine is just as much a case of too many mouths to feed relative to the country's actual food production as it is a case of too little food.



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13 Nov 2011, 9:15 am

Esteban wrote:
Gedrene wrote:
Esteban wrote:
Mexico has a much lower birth rate than Somalia and that has been the case for a long time, and has thus been able to avoid famine for decades, though not severe malnutrition in some places. Irrigating the desert costs money that Somalia doesn't have, and would be unnecessary if they had fewer mouths to feed. Even if they did have a green revolution, at the rate the population is growing (and the birth rate is so high that despite the high death rate and emigration it's one of the fastest-growing populations in the world), it'd just be a matter of time before it outgrows the country's capacity to feed it.

And I again say that this is a false idea because you are trying to equate capacity to produce according to existing resources with absolute ability to produce resources...
The problem is wealth and technology. Technology I am sure would be able to massively increase the amount of food available on the planet according to the natural resources that exist within it. In Somalia's case the scarcity of food producing technology is also a large factor.

Yes, I'm sure Somalia could produce a lot more food with modern industrialized agriculture - which requires fuel, machinery, lots of water, fertilizers, etc. All of which has a cost, both in terms of physical resources (the fossil fuels, labor, raw materials needed to produce them, the environmental degradation arising from their use) and in terms of money (in the developed world, agriculture is very heavily subsidized). Does the world really have the resources (fossil fuels, capacity to cope with pollution, etc) to have a Green Revolution in every country?

If one only realizes what can happen in terms of conventional technology then they are thinking within a constricted worldview. One can easily see irrigation running on some form of solar power system, of tractors running on various kinds of fuels. I think the Sahara can be one vast solar panel, or even possibly one massive irrigated farmland, if people feel it is economical to do so, which given the economic, social and political conditions is unlikely for the time being.


Esteban wrote:
Quote:
Mexico's and Somalia's relative birth rate have got nothing to do with Somalia's inability to produce enough food.

On the contrary, it has everything to do with it. If you have, say, the capacity to produce food for ten million, and you have a population of 15 million, you don't have the capacity to produce enough food. If you can produce food for 10 million, but have 8 million people then, with exactly the same capacity, you do have the capacity to produce enough food. 'Enough' depends not only on the actual amount produced, but also on how many mouths to feed you have. Say you have a population of 15 million and with a technological revolution, you can produce food for 30 million. Sounds good, but if your population doubles every 20 years, then you're only kicking the can down the road. The only solution is to bring some sanity to the birth rate, unless you consider genocide a solution.
First the fact is that the birth rate, the level of population, and the amount of food one can produce is intimately linked. Population influences food demand. If you have a low population the demand for food is low. You have no idea how much the economy can actually produce food-wise until you have a high population. There is no set food production counter you know.

So if there is a high birth rate whilst one may know how much food can be produced on the resources that were currently being exploited one does not know really how much more land may be turned to agriculture, what improvements can be made to agriculture and so forth.



Esteban
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14 Nov 2011, 10:45 pm

A bigger population means more demand for food only if the extra population can afford to buy it. Hungry people that are destitute don't create food out of thin air, they starve. Even with strong demand, I doubt irrigating the desert would be viable without massive subsidies - note that the US, Europe and Japan all heavily subsidize their agriculture, as do a number of Third World countries. Increasing agricultural productivity costs money, not least because pretty much all promising farmland is already being farmed on. Maybe there are some forests we could cut down, but not much. Somalia in particular is hardly promising in terms of growing anything other than maybe dates and cacti. In principle agricultural innovation could increase productivity (though Somalia is hardly a powerhouse of R&D) but that takes time, so it would be a race between Somalia's exploding population and increasing output. We're talking about a population that doubles every 20 years if memory serves. Or, if the birth rate fell to sane levels, a modest increase in yields, perfectly achievable with present technology, would be enough indefinitely.
But it's not just food - it's schools, hospitals, housing, safe water supplies, electricity, etc. Basically, it boils down to fundamental economic reality: resources are finite. You can't just add more and more mouths to feed and expect resources to be sufficient. It's also morally repugnant - by giving birth to too many children, who had no say in the matter, you're condemning them to dire poverty, by repeating this every generation you're dooming ever increasing numbers of people to lives of misery. In the Third World (little or no safety net), having more children than you can afford is just another form of child abuse - often deadly child abuse in the case of Somalia.



Gedrene
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15 Nov 2011, 11:03 am

Esteban wrote:
A bigger population means more demand for food only if the extra population can afford to buy it. Hungry people that are destitute don't create food out of thin air, they starve.

Nwo you are just ignoring the point I made about how people don't use all natural resources and how demand means that more resources will be employed. :/



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16 Nov 2011, 10:13 pm

Penniless people don't add to demand, you can only contribute to demand if you actually have money. Exploiting natural resources requires capital. Exploring and drilling for oil, opening a mine, etc require huge amounts of capital. But in any case your point is irrelevant; even if you use all natural resources, you can't feed an exploding population forever. Increasing demand means more resources are employed (hardly good news in the case of non-renewables), but this hits the law of diminishing returns, and more demand eventually merely means higher prices, not substantially more production. Farming is a good example - once you're already using all the good farmland (fertile, flat, plenty of water), then more and more demand means marginally increasing production in the good farmland by using more fertilizers, etc, and using poorer and poorer farmland. All of this has costs, so ever higher prices are needed just to cover the costs of increasing production (clearing forests, irrigating the desert, growing stuff in greenhouses, buying GM seeds, etc). Of course, it's not just the direct financial costs (the price of food) but also all the externalities - soil erosion and desertification brought about by cutting the forests, pollution from massive fertilizer and pesticide use, water shortages as water for irrigation diverts water from other uses, the use of petrochemicals and fossil fuels contributing to using up these resources, etc.



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19 Nov 2011, 10:38 am

People who want to have children will, and should, as long as they are responsible parents. But there's so much pressure on people, especially women, to have children that it becomes "the thing to do." This pressure needs to be alleviated and positive incentives established in their place for those who don't have children, so that the planet doesn't collapse under overpopulation and a neglected segment of society becomes an acceptable alternative.



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19 Nov 2011, 10:55 am

Esteban wrote:
But that's neither here nor there. No country can continue to feed, indefinitely, an exploding population like Somalia's, with or without Green Revolutions (which are themselves expensive - usually even access to huge markets aren't enough to bankroll them, and they require massive government subsidies). Therefore, either there will be a famine, or the birth rate will fall, or other factors will keep the population in check (genocide, war, epidemics). The Somali famine is just as much a case of too many mouths to feed relative to the country's actual food production as it is a case of too little food.


And we are nowhere near the absolute bearing capacity of this planet.

ruveyn



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20 Nov 2011, 10:59 am

Stop the world, I want off.



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21 Nov 2011, 7:44 am

ruveyn wrote:
Esteban wrote:
But that's neither here nor there. No country can continue to feed, indefinitely, an exploding population like Somalia's, with or without Green Revolutions (which are themselves expensive - usually even access to huge markets aren't enough to bankroll them, and they require massive government subsidies). Therefore, either there will be a famine, or the birth rate will fall, or other factors will keep the population in check (genocide, war, epidemics). The Somali famine is just as much a case of too many mouths to feed relative to the country's actual food production as it is a case of too little food.


And we are nowhere near the absolute bearing capacity of this planet.

ruveyn


True, and we are not working to get there. Famine has always been regional, and spreading. Somalia has sent a lot of people over the border, where they use up the food the world can supply, which cuts extra food from other areas, raising the potential for a much broader famine.

The ability to feed, means of spreading it around, are not growing like the world population, which will double quicker than last time. Most population growth is in areas already short food. The result, they will migrate.

Even in rural areas, it will reduce the population, providing for continous famine. The areas of perpetual over population, famine, and migration will overrun everything else.

Half a world with plenty, and half with most of the people, and nothing, will not be stable. Just the economic differance between Europe and Africa, The US and Mexico, has caused a great migration.

It is not happening somewhere else,

Without income for food, the new normal will be disease, and it is even better at crossing borders. Bad farming during the Roman era has left a wasteland today, where once was green and productive. Overuse kills land.

All deserts are expanding, droughts, reduced crops far from areas of famine. It is a planet wide problem. Capital and Technology have speeded up the problem, clearing forests to run cattle, turning grassland to brush through grazing, leaving desert.

It is not just population, famine, it is a planet in decline. More and more that once produced could not at any price. Once the land drys and the rains fail, there is no replacing it. We are dependant on Nitrogen to keep up production, for the natural soil fertility has died, we are farming sand.

We hit it durning the Dust Bowl, overworked land blew away, the current drought is getting closer and closer to the same conditions, and even before we were the problem, droughts in the west lasted 1,500 years.

Solmalia may do better than the US if we have several bad crop years. They do live within food production, we make ethanol, feed cattle, chickens, and our food ponzi is based on energy. Our economy is based on exporting food, we hold no reserves.

Population will grow, food production will drop.



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21 Nov 2011, 9:16 am

^ ^ ^

You said:

All deserts are expanding, droughts, reduced crops far from areas of famine. It is a planet wide problem. Capital and Technology have speeded up the problem, clearing forests to run cattle, turning grassland to brush through grazing, leaving desert.


I respond:

How do you explain the fact that Israel is a garden. It started out as a desert for the Jewish settlers who came there. No it blooms?

ruveyn



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21 Nov 2011, 11:13 am

Inventor wrote:
War does not work. WWII killed 50,000,000, but the world population never dipped. It only slowed the rate of increase, and was expensive, and blew up some nice stuff.

Korea, 10,000 rounds of everything, bombs, navel guns, down to pistols, for every wound, then only a third fatal.

Swords and spears are at least reusable.

the New Model is Warlordism. Take over an area, kill a lot, enslave the rest. It drives the breeders and surplus population onto your neighbors land, and weakens them.

African countries are being partitioned. Somalia belongs to Warlords. It has not been one country in a while.

This recent age of Kingdoms, Governments, was shortlived. They claimed more than they could hold, as the Colonial Era showed.

Russia could not hold the USSR together.

The Eurozone is coming apart.

They gave part of Serbia to Albanians.

What is the right size for a country?

France with Algeria, Viet Nam, West Africa, fell apart. Each of the parts is better off.

Africa is breaking down on Tribal lines, Sub Tribes, Language Groups. Just like it always was.

The British Empire.

No one group ever controlled Afganistan. The Tribal Areas of Pakistan were never under Government control.

It is the nature of all people to want to control themselves, and a few who want to conquer the world.

All Empires fall.


It's time to get off the pulpit, Reverend.



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21 Nov 2011, 11:55 am

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How do you explain the fact that Israel is a garden. It started out as a desert for the Jewish settlers who came there. No it blooms?

They're Jews. Everything works out for them.

You're dealing with a people that have lasted 3000 years and survived every attempt to wipe them out, of which there have been many. They're just naturally brilliant. Maybe we should put them in charge?

What Israel shows is that with hard work and ingenuity, you can make deserts bloom. Which in turn shows that we're lazy if we can't.



Esteban
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23 Nov 2011, 12:20 am

ruveyn wrote:
How do you explain the fact that Israel is a garden. It started out as a desert for the Jewish settlers who came there. No it blooms?

ruveyn


Because Israel is a rich country that can afford to heavily subsidize its agriculture. The desert blooms for the same reason the Japanese can grow rice on terraces on the hills or the US can grow so much corn - massive government subsidies. Obviously the Third World simply can't afford that. Third World farmers are poor because they receive little or nothing in government subsidies and they have to compete against subsidized First World farmers.

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And we are nowhere near the absolute bearing capacity of this planet.


Only because so many people lack basic necessities. To give everyone a decent standard of living would probably use up the resources of several Earths.